Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Each cell in a freshly erased block of a solid state drive may begin at a highest voltage state. Conventionally, each successive write operation to the block can reduce the voltage state of the cells but cannot increase the voltage state of the cells. In order to increase the voltage state of the cells, an erasure operation can be performed on the block where the cells in the block are modified back to the highest voltage state. However, a solid state drive can handle only a limited number of erasure operations in the drive's lifetime, thereby reducing the applicability of solid state drives in implementations where frequent erasure operations can be expected.